Straight White Men

[foxy]

If you liked Armie Hammer in that movie. You may have heard of it. Now is your chance to see him in the flesh or some of it.

 

https://2st.com/shows/current-production/straight-white-men?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5a2yvvKK2wIVmcDICh0KrwmZEAAYASAAEgJ9GPD_BwE

[+ newatthis]

If you liked Armie Hammer in that movie. You may have heard of it. Now is your chance to see him in the flesh or some of it.

 

https://2st.com/shows/current-production/straight-white-men?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5a2yvvKK2wIVmcDICh0KrwmZEAAYASAAEgJ9GPD_BwE

Saw this at Steppenwolf in Chicago last year and recommend it highly. What set it apart was the contrast between the pre-show antics of the 2 gender-fluid actors vs. the conventional play that follows. I know that the pre-show (i.e. from the moment you enter the theater until the "main play" actually begins) is to a large extent improvised, so I suppose ymmv.

[Walker1]

If you liked Armie Hammer in that movie. You may have heard of it. Now is your chance to see him in the flesh or some of it.

 

https://2st.com/shows/current-production/straight-white-men?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5a2yvvKK2wIVmcDICh0KrwmZEAAYASAAEgJ9GPD_BwE

Josh Charles is in it-I love Josh Charles-he is such a handsome man.

[edjames]

Looking forward to seeing this on August 16th...

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/theater/straight-white-men-review-armie-hammer-josh-charles.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Farts&action=click&contentCollection=arts&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Review: ‘Straight White Men,’ Now Checking Their Privilege on Broadway

 

You’ll have plenty to talk about after seeing “Straight White Men,” the smart and thorny Broadway anomaly that opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Monday. But don’t plan on talking much beforehand.

 

That’s because the preshow music is deliberately deafening. In the script, the playwright Young Jean Lee specifies “loud hip-hop with sexually explicit lyrics by female rappers.” Worth noting is the slight change from the play’s debut at the Public Theater in 2014, when the lyrics she specified were all that plus “nasty.”

 

Nastiness of any sort is not part of this Broadway outing, a Second Stage production directed by Anna D. Shapiro. The confrontational tone of the opening, as of the rest of the play, has been softened significantly. As soon as the lights dim, two charming “persons in charge” — Kate Bornstein, a gender theorist who defines herself as nonbinary, and Ty Defoe, a two-spirit member of the Oneida and Ojibwe nations — take the stage to apologize for any discomfort the music might have caused.

 

“Kate and I are well aware that it can be upsetting when people create an environment that doesn’t take your needs into account,” Mr. Defoe says, tongue in cheek.

 

Their presence, as well as the play’s title, may lead you to expect a scathing indictment of privilege, or at least an anthropological dissection of it. (A literal frame around the stage bears the caption “Straight White Men,” as if it were a diorama in a natural history museum.) And when the sparkly curtain rises on a middle-class basement family room, apparently decorated by the patriarchy itself — but really by the set designer Todd Rosenthal — the expectation of parody is further aroused.

 

That’s not what you get.

 

For one thing, the Nortons — Ed, a widower, and his three adult sons — are hyperaware of their relative good fortune and the unfairness to others it unavoidably entails. As children, the boys played a board game called Privilege, invented by their mother, that repurposed a Monopoly set to teach lessons about racism, denial and economic oppression. Whoever got the iron or thimble received a bonus for “unpaid domestic labor.”

 

The game’s challenge has not been lost on the boys as adults, though they each deal with it differently. Jake (Josh Charles) has become the very thing his mother probably hoped to prevent: a banker who drives a BMW, tells homophobic jokes and keeps nonwhite associates from advancing. (But at least he knows he’s wrong.) His younger brother, Drew (Armie Hammer), is convinced that by writing an antimaterialist novel and teaching one class a week he is using his abilities “in service to something bigger than myself.”

 

Jake’s complacency and Drew’s pretensions get punctured over the course of Christmas at Ed’s, amid family traditions including plaid pajamas, raillery and eggnog. (The old game of Privilege gets dragged out, too.) Though there is a slight, overbright satirical edge, Ms. Lee mostly paints Jake and Drew with the kind of sympathy and insider knowledge only an observant outsider could muster.

 

But they are not the play’s problem; the biggest threat they pose to the status quo is their superannuated roughhousing. In their early 40s, they still give each other wedgies.

 

Rather, it’s the oldest brother, Matt (Paul Schneider), who precipitates a crisis. Burdened by decades of student debt — and by an unexplained failure to thrive that has left him a self-described loser — he has returned home to live with Ed (Stephen Payne). He cleans and cooks, and would fully earn the unpaid domestic labor bonus if it really existed.

 

Though Matt says he’s happy with his choice, his upscale brothers, noting his horrible clothes, worry that he’s depressed. (The dead-on costumes are by Suttirat Larlarb.) His temp job making copies at a local community organization reads to them as a form of self-flagellation, so far beneath his abilities as to suggest pathology or, even worse, politics. Jake thinks Matt has deliberately suppressed any ambition to make room for others who have traditionally been excluded from positions of authority. Drew thinks he needs therapy.

 

Instead of resolving the mystery of Matt, Ms. Lee astutely complicates it. In boyhood, he was the most rigorously committed of the three to social justice, even forming a school for young revolutionaries whose fight “song” was an excerpt from Hegel. But as the wrangling over Matt becomes the main action of the play’s second half, the tonal shift from naked comedy to psychological witch hunt — it’s almost like a “Crucible” for underachievement — starts to seem heavy-handed.

 

You would expect no less from Ms. Lee, a downtown fixture whose home base from 2003 to 2016 — Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company — became notable for pulling real drama out of artificial constructions. If “Straight White Men” seemed bigger and more naturalistic than her typical work when it played Martinson Hall, a 199-seat black box theater at the Public, it was still aptly disorienting, maintaining the aura of surrealism that came from her years on the experimental vanguard.

 

But at the 581-seat Helen Hayes, recently restored to its former Broadway glory, some of that aura has faded. The casting of shiny actors like Mr. Hammer (of “Call Me By Your Name”) and Mr. Charles (of “The Good Wife”) has the perverse effect — though they are both spot on — of making the play seem mainstream. So does Ms. Shapiro’s direction, which is confident and highly polished; even the boys’ mortifying, half-remembered rec-room dance routines are snappily choreographed, by Faye Driscoll.

[leeper]

I didn't really get this play when I saw it last year in Chicago. Saw Young Jean Lee in the audience furiously taking notes and figured it might get some major rework. Saw it again two weeks ago in New York. It didn't change much at all from Chicago, I still didn't get it, but didn't hate it either. Enjoyed seeing Armie Hammer and Josh Charles on stage. Whatever she was going for had no resonance with me, but the reviews today were largely OK. Obviously they found more there than I did.

[edjames]

Saw this production last night and enjoyed seeing Armie and Josh on stage. The production is rather puzzling, especially when I walked into the theater and was "accosted" by a woman, Kate Bernstein, billed as Person In Charge I, dressed in a circus ringmaster costume who proceeded to annoy the hell out of me. Yes, she's part of the show. The music, a high energy and loud mix of what can only be described as a zoomba exercise class mix of rap, was distracting and annoying. Not a good way to start a show, fo me. fortunately, Ms. Bornstein had a pocketful of ear plugs!

Ms. Bornstein is joined by Ty Defoe, member of the Oneida and Ojibwe Indian Nations, and opening the show, and blessedly ending the music, they proceed to have an inane conversation.

At long last when the show begins we are treated to an interesting tale of the interaction of three siblings and their father at Christmastime. (It was about 90 degrees outside last night, so Christmas was a stretch.)

The boys act much as they have their whole life. Teasing and testing each others limits despite the fact that they've all reached middle age. The acting was good, and I have to admit I find Armie Hammer quite appealing.

Alas, the show does not end on a happy note.

All that said, I enjoyed the show, but could have done without all the extra production nonsense.

Ends September 9th.

[+ E.T.Bass]

I saw the west coast premier in Culver City a few years ago at the Kirk Douglas Theater. I didn't feel as much empathy for these guys as I was supposed to. I've seen worse plays and better ones.

Would be fun to see Armie Hammer in this. I expect he's good.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Hammer is pretty, but he's not proven himself to be much of an actor in anything he's done.

 

He had a moment to be the IT guy... And it passed him by.